Fuzzy-Kohonen-clustering neural network trained by genetic algorithm and fuzzy competition learning

Kohonen networks are well known for clustering analysis. Classical Kohonen networks for hard c-means clustering (trained by winner-take-all learning) have some severe drawbacks. Fuzzy Kohonen networks (FKCNN) for fuzzy c-means clustering are trained by fuzzy competition learning, and can get better clustering results than the classical Kohonen networks. However, both winner-take-all and fuzzy competition learning algorithms are in essence local search techniques that search for the optimum by using a hill-climbing technique. Thus, they often fail in the search for the global optimum. In this paper we combine genetic algorithms (GAs) with fuzzy competition learning to train the FKCNN. Our experimental results show that the proposed GA/FC learning algorithm has much higher probabilities of finding the global optimal solutions than either the winner-take-all or the fuzzy competition learning.